At her age, Mary thought a lot more about loss than Bill did at his age. He would discover later in life that everyone had loss, some of us more than others, and some people’s losses were worse than others. His, for example, would be pretty severe by the time he put them up against some other people’s. Already he had experienced his mother dying overnight, healthy one moment and dead the next. Later he would suffer the loss of his father in a hit and run car accident where his father was a pedestrian. And so it goes. He would come home from being out with his wife that night to discover that his father had been killed. This was still many years off in the future and something he would not know about until it happened.
Bea, for her part, had not had much loss. She hadn’t had any miscarriages or abortions. Her husband had not left her. Her children, well, she didn’t have any children and that was by choice. A good choice, she would say to anyone who would ask her. From there, her response included some choice negativity regarding children and sensual positivity regarding not having anyone to have to support other than herself. Life was pretty good for her, and it was even better when she was getting some from Bill which she began demanding more and more the more she understood that Bill could usurp her kitchen power and the more she understood that Mary truly cared for him.
If something was festering with Jim, the dishwasher, something surely was festering with Bea, the salad lady, the lady in charge of the kitchen. She had no designs on Henry Lee and could care less if he was doing Marie or anybody else. She had no designs on Bill either except getting it from him when she wanted. She liked the strange and she liked the vigor of his youth. And she liked the white boy, her lollipop. She liked her kitchen power too, and keeping that was of primary importance. Once they’d offered Bill the management job, she felt threatened
Mary was much more pensive than Bea ever was. Mary was heady, like Bill was. In order to do something such as be with Bill, it had to be an existential decision. She had to reason that in the end it didn’t mean shit to a train, that it was a what-the-hell. But even when she reasoned it this way, it wasn’t that. For Bea, it didn’t matter how long or how many times she enjoyed Bill’s sex. It was just sex. For Mary there was an intimacy about it and that intimacy translated to emotion and that emotion ran to…
Goddammit, Mary would think many times in her quiet time. Just plain Goddammit. Then she would get down on herself, ask herself why she had to start up with him in the first place, why she let herself get sucked into him. It ended in tragedy for her. She knew that right from the start. For Bill, he and his fiancé went away, wherever they went, and she was left there alone, left alone like she’d been when Yulie killed himself.
Worse, there was her boy, Eddie, who hated Bill just because he was white, who hated her because she allowed herself to be with a white boy.
“Why you gotta go with a white boy?” he had asked her several times already.
“Ain’t I taught you we all the same?” Mary replied. “Ain’t I taught you that color don’t make no difference?”
“But it does,” Eddie would say. “I hate him, I hate you and I hate Mr. Charlie.”
“That’s a lot of hate for a boy young as you,” Mary would say when Eddie would let her. She would try to hug him, to hold him close to her, but that was getting harder and harder.
